Douglas Rushkoff: Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, corporatism, economy
In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.
This fascinating journey, from the late Middle Ages to today, reveals the roots of our debacle. From the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self; from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking; from the birth of the modern, self-interested individual to his exploitation through the false ideal of the single-family home; from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of MySpace–the corporation has infiltrated all aspects of our daily lives. Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business.
Most of all, Life Inc. shows how the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse this six-hundred-year-old trend and to begin to create, invest, and transact directly rather than outsource all this activity to institutions that exist solely for their own sakes.
Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living–the operating system on which we are now running our social software–was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.
Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc. shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.
Publisher Random House, 2009
ISBN 1400066891, 9781400066896
Length 274 pages
More info (author)
More info (publisher)
More info (google books)
Georg Lukács: History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923/1972)
Filed under book | Tags: · bourgeoisie, capitalism, communism, dialectic, economy, historical materialism, history, marxism, philosophy, political economy, political theory, proletariat, social democracy
Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, History and Class Consciousness initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. The book is notable for contributing to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy, and for reconstructing many elements of Marx’s theory of alienation before most of the works of the Young Marx, in which it is expounded, had been published. Lukács’s work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class consciousness.
Originally published as Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, 1923.
First published in this edition by Merlin Press, London, 1971
Publisher MIT Press, 1972
ISBN 0262620200, 9780262620208
404 pages
Wikipedia
Publisher
Google books
PDF (23 MB, updated on 2014-9-5)
Comment (0)Manuel De Landa: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstract machine, economy, history, linguistics, meshwork, non-linear history, philosophy, self-organization
“Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.
De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.”
Publisher Zone Books, 1997
Swerve Editions, New York, 2000
ISBN 0942299329
333 pages
PDF (4 MB, updated on 2015-9-1)
Comment (1)